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Ruth Reichl on Challenging Career Moves

The renowned author and former editor of Gourmet talks about the magazine’s closure and her recent transition to fiction writing. She is featured in the Life’s Work section of the forthcoming June issue.

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard. I’m on the phone today with Ruth Reichl, former New York Times food critic and editor of Gourmet magazine, and a best-selling author. Her latest book is her first work of fiction, a novel called Delicious.

So I’d like to start with your career. It’s been full of interesting transitions, from being a cook to a critic, newspapers to magazines, now nonfiction to fiction. The one move I think our audience will find the most interesting was your switch from being an individual producer, a writer, to a manager, when you became editor in chief of Gourmet.

RUTH REICHL: I had been a manager before. It’s not evident from my resume, but when I was at the LA Times, I was the restaurant critic. And I kept complaining about the food section, which, at the time, was the largest food section in the country.

It was 60 or 70 pages every week, with a big staff and a test kitchen and a photo studio. And I was abruptly sort of blackmailed into becoming the food editor as well as the restaurant critic. So that was the big moment of learning management.

ALISON BEARD: And tell me about that switch.

RUTH REICHL: It was completely on the fly. You know, it was like one day, I was a restaurant critic, and the next, I suddenly had 20 people working for me. And it was a shock. And they kept saying to me, we’ll give you management lessons. But I never had time to take management lessons. So the learning curve was really steep.

I was not initially the best manager. I inherited people who were really different from me and the people I had been working with. They were from a very old-fashioned idea of what a food section should be. They were home economists who weren’t really writers or reporters.

In the beginning, I just sort of said, just give me your notes, and I’ll write it all. And it took a while for me to understand that management was an art. I finally realized that this woman who I didn’t particularly like but who had been very close to the former editor of the food section was actually a good manager, and I made her the deputy– I don’t remember what the title I gave her was– but to sort of manage the staff.

I learned that you really cannot expect everyone to be just like you. I mean, the big secret of management is to find what people do best and not to try and fit them into a mold. And I pretty much learned that on that job. I found out what everybody on the staff did well and tailored the job to them instead of the other way around.

ALISON BEARD: Do you think that women leaders like yourself bring something to the table that men don’t?

RUTH REICHL: I do. I think that women leaders are one, more practical. Two, I think that the big problem that corporate America now faces– you see it across everything. You see it in restaurants. You see it in big corporations– is the whole issue of balancing work and family. And I think women are much more sensitive to that. I think we have to find much better solutions to how people manage to have satisfying home lives and families and also satisfying work lives.

Instead of, right now, every time at Gourmet, some young editor came to me and said, you know, I’m pregnant. And I would say, are you going to come back to work? And almost all of them said, yes. And I said, now you’re going to understand what guilt is because no matter where you are, you’re going to feel guilty. If you’re at work, you feel like you should be home, and if you’re home, you feel like you should be at work. And I think as a nation, we have to solve that problem.

ALISON BEARD: Believe me, I know exactly what you’re talking about. So how did you manage your work-life balance when you were at the New York Times and Gourmet, and your son was young?

RUTH REICHL: With a huge amount of guilt. By sleeping very, very little. By trying to do it all and probably failing at everything. But I am a natural workaholic. And I was lucky. I had a lot of very good helpers.

But one of the things that was lucky that when Nick was young, I didn’t go to Gourmet until Nick was 10. When he was younger than that, being a restaurant critic is actually, even though you have to go out to dinner every night, I was the one picking Nick up at school every day. I mean, I do think that he would say that one of the real turning points in his life was when I went to Gourmet. And I was religious about coming home and cooking dinner every night. And that just meant planning ahead, getting the food into the house so when I came home, I could get dinner on the table quickly.

ALISON BEARD: Let’s talk a little bit about your time at Gourmet. You transformed what had been a very traditional magazine. So tell me how you managed that process.

RUTH REICHL: You know, I was really lucky because it was not difficult. I mean, I didn’t have to persuade anyone. I went in to the magazine, and it had been managed very much from the top down. Everything had been assigned at the top, and so editors were told, you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do this. And they had literally never had a meeting.

And I went in and said, we’re going to have a meeting. And I thought that I was going to have to talk for two hours because I did not expect people who were not accustomed to having meetings to open up. So we sat down, and I said, look, we have a mandate to do anything we want with this magazine. What do you think we should do? And I didn’t open my mouth for three hours.

And what the staff wanted to do was exactly what I wanted to do, what I think any sane person who was passionate about food in 1999 would have wanted to do, which was to deal with real food issues. The first produce issue we did, which was kind of a famous issue, in that Gourmet had never gone to the farms before and talked about who grew our food. No epicurean magazine had done that. And that wasn’t my idea. That was the staff.

And the people who were not interested in doing that left pretty quickly. I didn’t fire– I think I fired one person. They had told me at Conde Nast, you’re probably going to have to come in and clean house. And maybe it’s because I’m a woman, maybe it’s– I don’t know. But it never crossed my mind that I was just going to go in and fire everyone.

I thought, let me figure out who does what. There’s a lot of incredible knowledge here, and surely we can figure out how to make it work. And it was really easy.

I mean, the staff was full of ideas, eager to use their own ideas, eager to go out and find their own writers, really eager to take control. And I think I’m a very good boss for people who don’t want to be told what to do, and I’m a really bad boss for people who want to be told what to do. And those people very quickly realized that they couldn’t work with me and left.

ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like initiative is something you look for in the people you hire. What else is important to you?

RUTH REICHL: Mostly, I want people who are smarter than me in different ways. I wanted to hire an art director who knew way more than I did about what a magazine should look like, had more interesting ideas than I did. I wanted editors who had really out there ideas about writers that they would use. I wanted a copyeditor who was the biggest nitpicker on earth.

I just really wanted people who were very good at one thing. And I wanted to just empower them. I felt like my job was to hire really smart people and make it possible for them to do what they did.

ALISON BEARD: You know, I just read Delicious, and there’s a scene when the fictional magazine is abruptly shut down with details that I assume are drawn from your own experience at Gourmet. How did you and your employees react in real life?

RUTH REICHL: Well, let me say one, I’ve been at a lot of magazines that have closed. So that’s not specific to Gourmet. Anybody in print has been at a lot of places that have closed. And then Gilt Taste, which I went to, closed. So I have a lot of experience of closings. And it’s never different. Even if you should have seen it coming, the staff never does.

And one of the great things about working at magazines is it is the most collaborative work experience you could ever have. No one person can make a magazine. So you tend to be very close. And in every magazine I’ve ever been at that shut, we’ve sort of done the same thing, all go off and spend the night crying and drinking together.

ALISON BEARD: Looking back on those situations, is there anything you think you would have done differently?

RUTH REICHL: Yes. I would have managed up better, definitely. I would have spend more time making friends with the corporate people at the top. I feel like it was stupid for me not to have done that. Other than that, no, I wouldn’t have, because many of the things that people said were the reasons that Gourmet closed, which may be, that we were too ambitious, that we tried to make a magazine that stretched too far, that pushed the envelope too much– I wouldn’t change one bit of that.

To me, part of what working is about is trying to do the best that you can do. And I would not go back and try and make a less good magazine or a less passionate magazine. I just wouldn’t do that.

ALISON BEARD: You say in the acknowledgements of Delicious that you can’t describe your writing process. But would you try for me? How different was it to go from nonfiction to fiction?

RUTH REICHL: It’s completely different. Nonfiction is pretty easy, at least for me. I’ve been doing journalism for 45 years. And for me, nonfiction is pretty much you get in the shower, you think about the story, and you decide how you’re going to approach it. But your characters are given, and the facts are given. It’s really just which angle are you going to take.

My process with fiction is you’re just waiting for it. The best I can describe it is magic. You sit there and– I hate writing. Every writer I know hates writing. Because you just sit there, and on a really good day, you go away, and when you come back, you’ve been gone for a few hours, and there are words on the page. And you kind of vanish. I’m not trying to mystify it, but that’s really– I don’t think anybody knows where it comes from.

But it’s a matter of patience. You just have to sit and wait for it. It’s much harder with fiction because you’re not really in control of what the characters are going to do. And they often do things that you didn’t anticipate. And then you’ve got to go back and fix what went before because suddenly, this character has taken a turn you didn’t expect him or her to take.

ALISON BEARD: Circling back to your own path and career choices, how did you know when a move that you were making was the right one?

RUTH REICHL: I always thought they were the wrong ones, always. One of my adopted mothers said to me when I was the restaurant critic of the New York Times and I’d been offered Gourmet, and I said, it’s just not the right time. If it were a year down the road, I would do it.

And Paula looked at me and said, Ruth, it’s never the right time. Which is the best advice I’ve ever gotten. How I knew when something was the right thing to do was when it really scared me. It’s the things that scare you the most that you have to do.

ALISON BEARD: That’s not always easy to do in practice, though. So how do you force yourself to take that leap?

RUTH REICHL: You look down the road 10 or 15 years, and you say, do I really still want to be doing this? Don’t I want to be challenged? I mean, I think one of the secrets to staying young is to always do things that you don’t know how to do and to keep learning.

ALISON BEARD: I think that sounds like good advice. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed it.

RUTH REICHL: Thank you. This was really interesting.

ALISON BEARD: That was Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet magazine and author of the new novel Delicious. For more, go to HBR.org.

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